The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for the transmission of time discrete signals between two systems operating at different sampling rates. Stated another way, it relates to a method and apparatus whereby a signal sampled at a first sampling rate is converted to a signal sampled at a second sampling rate, and wherein the conversion is effected at a signal processing rate that is not higher than the higher of the two sampling rates.
A known digital sampling frequency converter is disclosed in an article "A Two-channel 16-bit Digital Sampling Frequency Converter for Professional Digital Audio," Lagadec et al, ICASSP-82 (International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing), Paris, Pages 93-96. In the converter described in this article, the sampling rate is increased 2.sup.15 times and then reduced, resulting in a disadvantageously high processing rate.
It is an object of the present invention to overcome this drawback of the prior art system by providing a method and apparatus for converting from one sampling rate to another sampling rate at a signal processing rate which is not higher than the higher of the two sampling rates.
Another object is to provide an apparatus which can be used at any desired ratio of sampling rates.
Still another object is to provide a system which is simple, employs a relatively low signal processing rate and can be used at any desired sampling rate ratio.